- This topic has 11 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 12 years, 1 month ago by
.
- Posts
Kudos to Obama for trying at least to push back on Israel’s and their stooges push for attacks on Iran – not easy in an election year, with the power and campaign funds of the Israel lobby.
But our own Cameron? WTF? He blithely claims that Iran is seeking to build an “inter-continental nuclear weapon”, and no one even challenges him?
This is the latest statement on the subject from the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, who is responsible for such decisions in Iran, and who has further weakened Ahmadinejad in the latest elections:
“The Iranian nation has never pursued and will never pursue nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that the decision makers in the countries opposing us know well that Iran is not after nuclear weapons because the Islamic Republic, logically, religiously and theoretically, considers the possession of nuclear weapons a grave sin and believes the proliferation of such weapons is senseless, destructive and dangerous.”
It’s not new; he’s been saying it for years. Here’s a quote from 2010:
“We have said repeatedly that our religious beliefs and principles prohibit such weapons as they are the symbol of destruction of generations. And for this reason we do not believe in weapons and atomic bombs and do not seek them.”
And from 2009:
“We fundamentally reject nuclear weapons and prohibit the use and production of nuclear weapons.”
(All quoted by Juan Cole, http://www.juancole.com/page/3.)As far as he’s concerned, the production, let alone use, of nuclear weapons is unislamic, against their fundamental principles. In the Islamic Republic, these things matter, and Khamenei’s word rules.
Not so much kudos to Obama for constantly tightening the sanctions on Iran, to try to force them to “change course”. If they’re not on that course anyway, how can that work, how can it be justified? If it’s really to try to force regime change, it won’t work. Rather it weakens the internal opposition to the clerical regime and entrenches the regime in power. In the meantime it punishes ordinary Iranians, forces up the price of oil, which may be good for the environment but makes a mockery of all the attempts to recover from the credit crunch and subsequent recessions, and increases tensions throughout the region, which really could do with a period of peace and stability.
It’s all so reminiscent of the build up to the Iraq war, the disastrous sanctions, the non-existent WMDs, the ridiculous 45 minute claim. Why do we let them do it again? How come the mistranslated quote about Iran wanting to wipe Israel off the map is repeated ad infinitum, yet what Khamenei has said, time and again, about nuclear weapons, not to mention his other declarations that Iran will never use a first strike (non-nuclear) against anyone, never see the light of day?
@ROB wrote:
But let’s face it – your “scepticism” pretty much rolls one way and one way only.
Yes, I’ve been consistently sceptical about the claims of those who foment war for military, political or economic gain and manipulate public and politicians, using lies and gross distortions of fact to do so. (Not that I think either Obama or Cameron are the main culprits here.) Strangely enough, events have proved me to be closer to the truth than those who peddled such spurious claims before, and the people who swallowed and regurgitated them.
Hence making it not worth listening to.
Is it at all possible that your personal animus is clouding your judgement? Shoot the messenger, eh? As I recall you were always rather quick to note others’ logical fallacies.
I don’t think that the military option will solve this issue. I don’t think too many people in positions of power do either.
I agree. But I also think the issue itself – the very idea that Iran is a threat to the US or Europe – is manufactured.
1984: US Senator Alan Cranston claims Iran is seven years away from making a weapon.
1992: Benjamin Netanyahu tells the Knesset that Iran is 3 to 5 years from being able to produce a nuclear weapon
1992: Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres tells French TV that Iran was set to have nuclear warheads by 1999.
1992 a task force of the House Republican Research Committee claimed that there was a “98 percent certainty that Iran already had all (or virtually all) of the components required for two or three operational nuclear weapons.”
1995: The New York Times conveys the fears of senior US and Israeli officials that “Iran is much closer to producing nuclear weapons than previously thought” – about five years away
1998: Donald Rumsfeld reports to Congress that Iran could build an intercontinental ballistic missile – one that could hit the US – within five years.
2004: Colin Powell tells reporters that Iran had been working on technology to fit a nuclear warhead onto a missile. “We are talking about information that says they not only have [the] missiles but information that suggests they are working hard about how to put the two together,” he said.2007: an unclassified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran is released, which controversially judges with “high confidence” that Iran had given up its nuclear weapons effort in fall 2003.
The report, meant to codify the received wisdom of America’s 16 spy agencies, turns decades of Washington assumptions upside down.
Despite reports and intelligence assessments to the contrary, Israeli and many US officials continue to assume that Iran is determined to have nuclear weapons as soon as possible.How often have you read assertions that Iran is close to producing nuclear warheads and intercontinental ballistic missiles to put them on, so it can nuke the US, the UK, not to mention Israel, which it determined to “wipe off the map”? How often have you read Khamenei’s pronouncements on the subject?
Who would you believe? Is there no rational basis for scepticism?
The key emotional element to all the propaganda, what works so well in the West, why it’s somehow so much worse than India, Pakistan or North Korea having nukes, or even the totally rational, law-abiding, peace-loving and trustworthy state of Israel, is nicely put by Netanyahu: “You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the world should start worrying, and that’s what is happening in Iran.”
So of course it wouldn’t do to publicise the anti-nuclear words of the swivel-eyed leader of Iran, when they show him being saner and less dangerous than those making the case for air strikes.
Given that US, European and Israeli intelligence services and the IAEA are all much more sceptical about the programme than those who are pushing for military attacks are prepared to acknowledge, it’s clear that the real intention behind the sanctions, Stuxnet, the assassinations, the threats, the general war-mongering against Iran is to bring about regime change.
I’d love to see the theocratic regime overthrown, but from within, since it’s not really any of our business. (Even if we brought R2P into it, that would work the other way, wouldn’t it, since by far the greatest danger to all those civilians would be from Israeli or US air strikes, not from their own government?) And all these measures are having the opposite effect. The recent results are clear to see: further and deeper manipulation of the voting system to prevent members of the internal opposition from even running, not to mention imprisonment and/or long-term house arrest of the most credible opposition leaders; further restrictions on foreigners entering the country and radical new controls on internet use to stop the spread of information and to prevent internal organization; entrenchment of the hardline elements of the regime in power; increased poverty among the middle class which, as usual, means they have to keep their heads down and concentrate on getting by rather than organizing politically; the natural patriotic pulling together in the face of external threats; and so on and so forth.
Top ten media failures in the Iran war debate
Posted By Stephen M. Walt Sunday, March 11, 2012 – 10:18 AM ShareI did a brief interview for All Things Considered last Friday, on the topic of media handling of the current war scare over Iran. Here’s a link to the story, which ran over the weekend.
The interview got me thinking about the issue of media coverage of this whole business, and I’m sorry to say that most mainstream news organizations have let us down again. Although failures haven’t been as egregious as the New York Times and Washington Post’s wholesale swallowing of the Bush administration’s sales pitch for war in 2002, on the whole the high-end media coverage has been disappointing. Here are my Top Ten Media Failures in the 2012 Iran War Scare.
#1: Mainstreaming the war. As I’ve written before, when prominent media organizations keep publishing alarmist pieces about how war is imminent, likely, inevitable, etc., this may convince the public that it is going to happen sooner or later and it discourages people from looking for better alternatives. Exhibits A and B for this problem are Jeffrey Goldberg’s September 2010 article in The Atlantic Monthly and Ronan Bergman’s February 2012 article in the New York Times Magazine. Both articles reported that top Israeli leaders believed time was running out and suggested that an attack might come soon.
#2: Loose talk about Iran’s “nuclear [weapons] program.” A recurring feature of Iran war coverage has been tendency to refer to Iran’s “nuclear weapons program” as if its existence were an established fact. U.S. intelligence services still believe that Iran does not have an active program, and the IAEA has also declined to render that judgment either. Interestingly, both the Times’ public editor Arthur Brisbane and Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton have recently chided their own organizations for muddying this issue.
#3: Obsessing about Ahmadinejad. A typical insertion into discussions of Iran is to make various references to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, usually including an obligatory reference to his penchant for Holocaust denial and his famously mis-translated statement about Israel “vanishing from the page of time.” This feature is often linked to the issue of whether Iran’s leaders are rational or not. But the obsession with Ahmadinejad is misleading in several ways: he has little or no influence over Iran’s national security policy, his power has been declining sharply in recent months, and Supreme Leader Ali Khameini — who does make the key decisions — has repeatedly said that nuclear weapons are contrary to Islam. And while we’re on the subject of Iranian “rationality,” it is perhaps worth noting that its leaders weren’t goofy enough to invade Iraq on a pretext and then spend trillions of dollars fighting an unnecessary war there.
#4: Ignoring Iranian weakness. As I’ve noted before, Iran is not a very powerful country at present, though it does have considerable potential and could exert far more international influence if its leaders were more competent. But its defense budget is perhaps 1/50th the size of U.S. defense spending, and it has no meaningful power-projection capabilities. It could not mount a serious invasion of any of its neighbors, and could not block the Strait of Hormuz for long, if at all. Among other things, that is why it has to rely on marriages of convenience with groups like Hezbollah or Hamas (who aren’t that powerful either). Yet as Glenn Greenwald argues here, U.S. media coverage often portrays Iran as a looming threat, without offering any serious military analysis of its very limited capabilities.
#5: Failing to ask why Iran might want a bomb. Discussions of a possible war also tend to assume that if Iran does in fact intend to get a nuclear weapon, it is for some nefarious purpose. But the world’s nine nuclear powers all obtained these weapons first and foremost for deterrent purposes (i.e., because they faced significant external threats and wanted a way to guarantee their own survival). Iran has good reason to worry: It has nuclear-armed states on two sides, a very bad relationship with the world’s only superpower, and more than three dozen U.S. military facilities in its neighborhood. Prominent U.S. politicians repeatedly call for “regime change” there, and a covert action campaign against Iran has been underway for some time, including the assassination of Iranian civilian scientists.
#6: Failing to consider why Iran might NOT want a bomb. At the same time, discussions of Iran’s nuclear ambitions often fail to consider the possibility that Iran might be better off without a nuclear weapons capability. As noted above, Supreme Leader Khameini has repeatedly said that nuclear weapons are contrary to Islam, and he may very well mean it. He could be lying, but that sort of lie would be risky for a regime whose primary basis for legitimacy is its devotion to Islam. For another, Iran has the greatest power potential of any state in the Gulf, and if it had better leadership it would probably be the strongest power in the region. If it gets nuclear weapons some of its neighbors may follow suit, which would partly negate Iran’s conventional advantages down the road. Furthermore, staying on this side of the nuclear weapons threshold keeps Iran from being suspected of complicity should a nuclear terrorist attack occur somewhere. For all these reasons, I’d bet Iran wants a latent nuclear option, but not an actual nuclear weapon. But there’s been relatively little discussion of that possibility in recent media coverage.
#7: Exaggerating Israel’s capabilities. In a very real sense, this whole war scare has been driven by the possibility that Israel might feel so endangered that they would launch a preventive war on their own, even if U.S. leaders warned them not to. But the IDF doesn’t have the capacity to take out Iran’s new facility at Fordow, because they don’t have any aircraft that can carry a bomb big enough to penetrate the layers of rock that protect the facilities. And if they can’t take out Fordow, then they can’t do much to delay Iran’s program at all and the only reason they might strike is to try to get the United States dragged in. In short, the recent war scare-whose taproot is the belief that Israel might strike on its own-may be based on a mirage.
#8: Letting spinmeisters play fast and loose with facts. Journalists have to let officials and experts express their views, but they shouldn’t let them spout falsehoods without pushing back. Unfortunately, there have been some egregious cases where prominent journalists allowed politicians or government officials to utter howlers without being called on it. When Rick Santorum announced on Meet the Press that “there were no inspectors” in Iran, for example, host David Gregory didn’t challenge this obvious error. (In fact, Iran may be the most heavily inspected country in the history of the IAEA).
Even worse, when Israeli ambassador Michael Oren appeared on MSNBC last week, he offered the following set of dubious claims, without challenge:
“[Iran] has built an underground nuclear facility trying to hide its activities from the world. It has been enriching uranium to a high rate [sic.] that has no explanation other than a military nuclear program – that has been confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency now several times. It is advancing very quickly on an intercontinental ballistic missile system that’s capable of carrying nuclear warheads.”
Unfortunately, MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell apparently didn’t know that Oren’s claims were either false or misleading. 1) Iran’s underground facility was built to make it hard to destroy, not to “hide its activities,” and IAEA inspectors have already been inside it. 2) Iran is not enriching at a “high rate” (i.e., to weapons-grade); it is currently enriching to only 20% (which is not high enough to build a bomb). 3) Lastly, Western intelligence experts do not think Iran is anywhere near to having an ICBM capability.
In another interview on NPR, Oren falsely accused Iran of “killing hundreds, if not thousands of American troops,” a claim that NPR host Robert Siegel did not challenge. Then we got the following exchange:
Oren: “Imagine Iran which today has a bunch of speedboats trying to close the Strait of Hormuz. Imagine if Iran has a nuclear weapon. Imagine if they could hold the entire world oil market blackmailed. Imagine if Iran is conducting terrorist organizations through its terrorist proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah. Now we know there’s a connection with al-Qaida. You can’t respond to them because they have an atomic weapon.”
Siegel: Yes. You’re saying the consequences of Iran going nuclear are potentially global, and the consequences of a U.S. strike on Iran might also be further such attacks against the United States…”
Never mind the fact that we have been living in the nuclear age for some 60 years now, and no nuclear state has even been able to conduct the sort of aggressive blackmail that Oren suggests Iran would be able to do. Nuclear weapons are good for deterrence, and not much else, but the news media keep repeating alarmist fantasies without asking if they make sense or not.
Politicians and government officials are bound to use media moments to sell whatever story they are trying to spin; that’s their job. But It is up to journalists to make this hard, and both Mitchell and Siegel didn’t. (For another example of sloppy fact-checking, go here).
9. What about the human beings? One of the more bizarre failures of reporting on the war debate has been the dearth of discussion of what an attack might mean for Iranian civilians. If you take out some of Iran’s nuclear facilities from the air, for example, there’s a very real risk of spreading radioactive material or other poisonous chemicals in populated areas, thereby threatening the lives of lots of civilians. Yet when discussing the potentially dangerous consequences of a war, most discussions emphasize the dangers of Iranian retaliation, or the impact on oil prices, instead of asking how many innocent Iranian civilians might die in the attack. You know: the same civilians we supposedly want to liberate from a despotic clerical regime.
10. Could diplomacy work? Lastly, an underlying theme in a lot of the coverage is the suggestion that diplomacy is unlikely to work, because it’s been tried before and failed. But the United States has had very little contact with Iranian officials over the past thirty years, and only one brief set of direct talks in the past three years. Moreover, we’ve insisted all along that Iran has to give up all nuclear enrichment, which is almost certainly a deal-breaker from Tehran’s perspective. The bottom line is that diplomacy has yet to succeed-and it might not in any case-but it’s also never been seriously tried.
I’m sure you can find exceptions to the various points I’ve made here, especially if you move outside major media outlets and focus on online publications and the blogosphere. Which may be why more people are inclined to get their news and analysis there, instead of from the usual outlets. But on the whole, Americans haven’t been well-served by media coverage of the Iran debate. As the president said last week, “loose talk” about an issue like this isn’t helpful.
Mach award or not, I’m posting again, because this poll is very heartening:
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brunitedstatescanadara/712.php?nid=&id=&pnt=712&lb=Though a majority of Americans believe the propaganda about the alleged nuclear weapons programme and intent, they haven’t bought the whole Netanyahu package: they are strongly opposed to an Israeli attack, preferring negotiations, and want the US to remain neutral, with only 25% wanting the US to provide military assistance in any attack. Unlike their representatives.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.